Second Nature offers new artistic interventions and observations of a fragile world: a world in which technics and ideology have merged to produce a complex image-landscape in which traditional notions of truth and reality can no longer be taken for granted, and even nature itself has been fundamentally altered by human intervention. In this uncertain and challenging moment, in 2017, this diverse group of artists, informed by their shared experiences and working proximity over the last two years, are developing methods to critique, analyze, and recover vulnerable images, materials, and relations. Together and separately, their working processes have become another kind of second nature—an almost instinctual critical approach to looking at and making images—formed in the intensive learning and working environment of the Parsons MFA Program. Second Nature is both a commentary on our present, and a proposition for other ways of working and exploring how this group of artists has mediated the world around them.

Chelsea Haines is an independent curator and doctoral candidate in art history at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research and curatorial work explores often antagonistic relationships between art, politics, and cultural identity. She has curated and co-curated solo projects with artists including Theaster Gates (Vera List Center for Art and Politics), Dor Guez (The James Gallery), and Jon Rubin (9th Shanghai Biennial), and has curated group exhibitions for organizations including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Residency Unlimited, and Portland State University.